Precinct analysis: Democratic Senate primary

After the May 29 primary, runnerup Senate candidate Grady Yarbrough said he did as well as he had because he “went directly” to counties where there is “a heavy Hispanic and African American population”. I don’t remember him ever being in Harris County, but let’s see how he did here anyway.

Yarbrough did do well in the six African-American districts, but not by much over Addie Allen. He won two districts handily (139 and 142), won two by smaller margins (141 and 147), and lost one by a small margin (146) and one by a larger margin (131, where I presume being named “Addie Allen” was advantageous). In the Latino districts, he won 140 by a decent margin, 143 by a small margin, and lost in 144, 145, and 148. I don’t know that that says anything about Yarbrough’s claimed outreach. He surely benefited from the contested primaries in 131, 146, and 147, but there are no runoffs in any of them. Sadler ought to do better in Harris in the runoff; he will need to if he wants to win.

How about around the state? Here are the ten counties in which each candidate performed the best, limited to counties in which at least 1000 votes were cast. You can see the full results in this spreadsheet. First, Addie Allen:

Allen is from Beaumont, so her good showing in Orange and Jefferson Counties are not unexpected. Note that in half of these counties she still finished second to Paul Sadler. Speaking of which, here are Sadler’s best counties:

Sadler won a majority in 24 counties, and did pretty well in his back yard of East Texas. I don’t know how many votes there will be in some of those counties in July, though. He’ll surely want to focus on the big urban counties. He’s got a good head start in Travis, and he did finish second in Dallas, well ahead of Yarbrough. Here’s Yarbrough:

Yarbrough is also from East Texas, though he lives in San Antonio now. He did all right there, though as you can see he still finished behind Sadler in Smith County and just held him off in Calhoun. If I thought he was actually running a campaign, I’d advise him to fight it out with Sadler in the big urban counties. I don’t really expect him to do anything, which is fine by me. Finally, here are Sean Hubbard’s best counties:

Hooray for Guadalupe County! Of interest is that Hubbard did well in Denton and Collin, his home area, and that Sadler did well along with him. With Hubbard endorsing Sadler, that may be a boost for him in the runoff. There were a bit more than 200,000 votes cast in the 2006 Democratic primary runoff, a bit less than that in the 2008 runoff, so my guess is there will be about that many votes cast in this July’s election. First candidate to 100,000 votes wins. See the Trib’s interactive map for more.

2 Comments

To my amateur eye, there appears to be some overlap between Yarbrough’s success and the areas which match former Houston city council district B in which a Yarbrough once served as council member. Acres Homes, northside, Fifth Ward.

To break this down a little further Charles, Mr. Yarbrough did well in 139 which just happens to now contain the Black precincts and all of Oak Forest that were most recently represented by former State Represedntative Ken Yarbrough and in which his daughter appeared on the ballot two years ago. As for District 140, a fair number of precincts there were also represented by Ken Yarbrough and in District 142, it has been represented on Houston City Council by Michael Yarbrough, who has also run a couple of other races appearing on the ballot. Coincidence? You decide. Interestingly enough, check out District 138, which was the Anglo part of Rep Yarbrough’s destrict and you will see that Grady Yarbrough did not fare near as well as elsewhere…